Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday June 02, 2010 @10:27AM
from the daylight-readable dept.

MojoKid writes "Mobile computing is making its mark at Computex 2010, with tablet PCs and e-readers of all sorts coming out for the first time as rivals to Apple's iPad. After announcing its Eee Pad tablet PC, Asus offered some hands-on time with its new e-Reader/e-Writer, designed for students and mobile business professionals. The little slate's features include 10-hour battery life, 2,450 dpi resolution touch screen, pen writing and input controls, 2MP camera, USB port, and a MicroSD slot. In addition, Asus also has strong ties with Amazon, so it wouldn't be a reach to see some sort of partnership between Asus and Amazon with the Kindle bookstore as a content provider."

So I take you think it was a mistake to offer, for almost 3 decades now, color video in cameras with electronic (and typically b&w) viewfinders? Same with many bridge digicams...I guess they should revert to making b&w pictures when using their built-in electronic viewfinder.

What I would like is to use such a thing to read books that I own, not DRM-krippled rental boks that Amazon foists on Kindle users.

Until then, no thanks. I've got books on my shelves that are over 100 years old, and I can still read them, although the publisher, printer and distributer have all long-since gone out of business. I've got books I bought 20 years ago, and I can still read them.

There's no commitment, and no possibility of commitment, from Amazon or any of the other DRM-krippled e-bok vendors that I will be able to read their rental boks tomorrow, much less twenty years from now.

Am I out of line by whining that we all should be well over the use of monochrome displays in these devices?

Well, yeah.

When I see an eReader using a monochrome display I think "that looks so last decade..."

What matters isn't how something looks, but how it works and, unless you're interested in photographs and videos (ie, not in the target market for this device) monochrome works perfectly fine as it is. Plus if it reduces costs so much that they can sell it for only $199, I'm all for it.

and the strange thing to me is that it takes Apple and its iPad to deliver full color output?

No, we've had color tablets for *years*, Apple's only "invention" was giving theirs a sane price.

At first I was fairly skeptical of this eee-Pad or whatever, I thought it was gonna be little more than an iPad clone with the Apple logo switched by an Asus one, and retail for about as much. But this actually looks like an interesting device, not one aimed at the "rich hipster" who wants to watch Blu-Ray movies on his living room, but one aimed at students and workers which likely thought about getting a Tablet PC to do their work, but found the iPad too limited and the others too expensive.

Monochrome? so are my notes. Small? so much the better. Camera on the back? I'm not interested in chatting up with it, I want it to document stuff. And to top it off it's only $199. Just genius.

There are huge benefits to using E-ink for a reader over a traditional screen (battery life, eye-strain), and right now E-ink is essentially limited to monochrome. Add to that the fact that most books are just black text on white and it becomes more of a balanced trade-off than you make it sound. The iPad is a web/video browsing device that also happens to show books, so clearly monochrome would be out of the question.

Plenty of other companies do colour tablets. Have been since XP Tablet Edition almost a decade ago. The issue is that they're power-hungry and they cause eyestrain because you're basically staring at the backlight when you're reading off them. Monochrome reflective displays, often as E-ink, are favoured for "readers" because you're only getting ambient light and they run for a long time. Apple's made a judgement call and decided that long-term reading isn't used enough to justify hobbling a whole tablet to accomodate it. For battery life, they've just put a really fucking huge battery in there.

I am one of the "note takers," essentially a professional one. I don't use color. I don't WANT color. Color destroys readability.

Right now I use a LiveScribe Pulse pen.

1) No immediate feedback.2) Clumsy applications.3) Limited memory.4) Must be synchronized to a PC.5) No close handwriting recognition integration.6) VERY limited user interface.

I would LOVE to be using a tablet of some kind so that I can actually see what I'm doing. So why am I using an ink-based pen? Because there is NO alternative for taking many hours worth of handwritten notes on battery power with very low weight right now. Back in the day there was the Newton 2x00 and it was, so far as I'm concerned, the Greatest Device Ever Created for my purposes and I would still be using it (I have three, two were backups) if not for the fact that the NCU (sync software) wasn't updated beyond Windows 95 / Mac OS 8 compatibility, so synchronizing is now impossible.

For a good 10 years I've been crossing my fingers hoping against hope that someone would come up with a Newton-like replacement: similar form factor, similar display, similar high-resolution stylus-based digitizer, etc. This looks damned close in terms of size and input method.